Many senior scientists in Britain have been worrying about the impact a change of government in next year’s general election might have on their activities. After all, the Conservative party has had little to say about science – compared to other fields of policy - in the recent past. And who knows what effect a big intake of new right-wing Tory MPs might have?

He promised, above all, continuity: “We mustn’t fight political battles over science. Science should be the least ideological area in government. It’s difficult enough to raise the level of public debate about science, without unseemly squabbles among politicians,” he said.-

Afriyie welcomed Labour’s establishment of the Technology Strategy Board and added: “Stability is what’s needed right now. So let me offer reassurance. I am not planning a major reworking of either the dual funding system or the apparatus of science policy.”

He was only partially reassuring on funding: “If fortunate enough to serve as science minister, I’m going to fight tooth and nail for science. But it’s reckless to make undeliverable promises. Spending constraint will apply for any incoming party.”

As Afriyie noted, “Gordon Brown has made a-song-and-a-dance over the ring-fenced science budget.” He said a Conservative government would respect the ring fence, while repeating that “I cannot promise spending increases with an economy on its knees.”

Afriye also supported the independence of scientific advice to government, in the wake of Professor Nutt’s dismissal as head of the advisory council on drug misuse: “A number of scientists have signed a Statement of Principles setting out how they think independent scientific advice should operate. I believe those principles offer a strong basis for a new framework.”

“Science has a great future with Conservatives,” he concluded.

I hope he is right, because it would be sad if scientific opinion in Britain became associated with the Labour party, in the way that American scientists have become associated with the Democrats.

Engineers at Cern near Geneva hope to restart the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful atom smasher, this weekend.

Understandably it will be a low-key affair, with the media not invited, in contrast to the razzmatazz of the original start-up in September 2008. Nine days later the $8bn LHC suffered a serious electromagnetic failure and it has been shut down ever since, as Cern carried out comprehensive repairs and installed new safety equipment.

Cern engineers repair a damaged magnet

If final checks are satisfactory, Cern engineers will send proton beams round the 27km LHC underground ring tomorrow at fairly low energy, first in one direction and then in the other.

They may carry out some collisions between beams before Christmas, again at relatively low energy. But the moment Cern calls “first physics” – the first high-energy collisions that could produce interesting scientific results – is unlikely to come until January. And Cern has promised to invite some journalists then, though there may not be more than a day or two’s notice.

I had my best theatrical experience of 2009 last night, seeing Inherit the Wind at London’s Old Vic.

My expectations of this 1955 dramatisation of the 1925 Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ were high, after its excellent reviews. And of course the political debate over teaching evolution and creationism still very much alive.

David Troughton (left) and Kevin Spacey

But I did not expect the revival to bring tears to my eyes, as happened on several occasions last night. I found the clash between biblical intolerance (with David Troughton playing the William Jennings Bryan prosecutor in the original trial) and liberal freethinking (Kevin Spacy in the role of Darwinian defender Clarence Darrow) extraordinarily moving.

Inherit the Wind is on at the Old Vic till December 20. Catch it if you can.

A visit to Purdue, a state university in the cornfields of Indiana almost three hours drive from Chicago, shows the strength in depth of the US academic system.

I’m just back from my third visit, courtesy of Purdue’s imaginative Science Journalism Laureates programme. On each occasion I have been struck by the intellectual quality of the academic staff – faculty, as they are known in America – and the curiosity of the students.

For research as a whole, Purdue is not in the same league as Harvard or Stanford but in some fields it is world class. One is palaeoclimatology, the study of past climate and what it can tell us about the likely course of global warming in future.

Matt Huber left me fascinated but deeply depressed by his latest conclusions about the climate’s response to rising and falling levels of carbon dioxide over the past 50m years. He and his Purdue colleagues have discovered that climate is more sensitive to CO2 than previously suspected – which is of course extremely bad news for efforts to control manmade global warming. I’ll use his insights soon for an FT article on climate history.

Another Purdue scientist with thought-provoking views is David Waters. He showed us how misguided some of the big clinical trials of vitamins and nutritional supplements have been – particularly the $175m US trial to see whether selenium pills can cut men’s risk of prostate cancer, which was stopped last year because it was, if anything, increasing the incidence of disease.

The problem, according to Waters, was that the trial took all comers in the chosen age group, rather than focussing on those – a minority in the US – who are actually deficient in selenium. From that base he built a devastating critique of the “either-or-ness” of public health medicine, and the search for things that are “good for you”.

Part of the rationale for the laureates programme is to interact with Purdue people – and part to discuss issues in science journalism. This year’s set-piece theme was “science journalism in the age of Twitter” in the form of what Americans call a “town hall meeting” with Purdue staff.

Each of the 12 journalists present had to kick off proceedings with a 100-word statement. One managed to do so within the 140-character (about 25 words) Twitter limit.

Opinions about the future of science journalism varied from optimism through “we’ve seen it all before” to utter gloom.

I’m off to the US for a few days, to join the Science Journalism Laureates programme at Purdue University in Indiana. I may have time to blog from there. Otherwise I’ll resume when I get back next week. Thanks for reading.

Britain’s Academy of Medical Sciences has launched an imaginative new study – on the use in research of animals containing human genes or cells.

“This area of science has had very little public discussion, though it has been scientifically very important and has led to some important medical advances,” says Martin Bobrow, the Cambridge University medical geneticist who will lead the study.

Animals containing human material – mostly transgenic mice with genes of human origin – are used routinely in laboratories world-wide. They have enabled researchers to make groundbreaking advances in understanding the causes and devising treatments of disease.

However, increasingly powerful methods for introducing human material into animals, including new stem cell technologies and ways to transfer many genes together, will present new opportunities and significant regulatory and ethical challenges in the future.

Recent examples of research involving animals containing human material include: rhesus macaque monkeys that carry a human form of the Huntington’s gene which allow scientists to investigate the development of the disease; mice with brains containing up to 25 per cent human neurones; and mice with human-like livers in which the effects of new drugs can be studied.

The new study is, in a sense, the converse of the debate in the UK last year about “hybrid embryos” that were essentially human but with some added animal material, says Prof Bobrow. “Now we are talking about animals with human bits added to them. We are not going to talk about hybrid human embryos again. Nor are we going to discuss the principles of doing research on animals.”

Launching the study at the Science Media Centre in London, the academy’s working group members said they did not personally know of any particularly objectionable research projects under way or being planned.

Robin Lovell-Badge of the MRC National Institute for Medical Research said the type of future experiment that might arouse particular public opposition included ones that gave animals a partially human appearance. “If you had human-like eyes, features, hands or feet, that might be upsetting,” he said.

Prof Bobrow said he was open-minded about how the study would proceed over the next 12 to 18 months. “We will not only be focusing on the ethical dimensions of this research but also on how it is perceived by the public,” he said. “Do these constructs challenge our idea of what it is to be human? It is important that we consider these questions now so that appropriate boundaries are recognised and research is able to fulfil its potential.”

Lord Drayson, the science minister, has had a frantic time since returning to London on Tuesday from a motor racing trip to Japan. He has had to placate an army of angry scientists protesting against the threat to the independence and academic freedom of expert advisers, following the sacking of Professor David Nutt as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs a week ago.

Late this afternoon Drayson – one of nature’s optimists – told me he saw a positive way forward. “There’s a real opportunity for good to come out of this row,” he said.

The statement makes three points. Firstly, advising government should not reduce a scientist’s academic freedom to communicate publicly. Secondly, independent committees must be protected from political interference in their work. And lastly, committees’ reports should be published – and when the advice is rejected for reasons that go beyond the scientific evidence, the reasons should be described explicitly and publicly.

Lord Drayson

Drayson called the one-page statement “a helpful starting point”. Between now and Christmas he would be working with John Beddington, government chief scientist, and the scientists who drafted the statement to produce new guidelines for independent advice. These might include additional material from the government’s existing code of practice.

Although much of the statement reflects existing practice, there is one point that would require a change in Whitehall machinery. At present advisory committees have to work through their parent department’s press office when they release a report or want to contact the media – which might introduce political factors into their presentation.

The statement, reflecting a recent recommendation by the House of Commons science committee, says advisory groups should use an independent press office. Drayson agreed: “I think it would be a good idea if advisory committees had access to a body like the Science Media Centre.”

The most frightening moment of my journalistic career was reporting on the discovery in April 1996 of the link between BSE and CJD. Sensible scientists expressed fears that Britain could be in for a large epidemic of incurable brain disease as a result of people having eaten meat contaminated with mad cow disease.

Those fears persisted as the annual death toll from vCJD – the form of disease linked to BSE – rose to 28 in 2000. Thankfully that year turned out to be the peak.

The unit’s up-to-date monthly surveillance figures, also out this week, show two vCJD deaths in 2009 and four definite or probable vCJD patients still alive.

There will almost certainly be a few more vCJD cases over the next few years. All are of course horrific tragedies for the patients and their families.

The number may even pick up again if it turns out that prions (the infectious proteins responsible) have been spread through blood transfusions – or if people in different genetic groups, who have not yet succumbed, turn out to be susceptible but with much long incubation periods.

But we have been spared the terrible mind-destroying epidemic that seemed possible in the late 1990s.

The gap between basic science and commercial application is a preoccupation of European policymakers, so the meeting attracted a good crowd to the venue (the Brussels mission of the German state of Baden-Württemberg).

The key word in the title turned out to be “successful”. The official speakers – mainly researchers and entrepreneurs from Germany but also with French and Belgian representatives – talked of how well technology was being transferred from bioscience labs to the market.

Some members of the audience challenged this rosy view. Someone from the EC research directorate said: “Usually when people come to Brussels they want something from us, but you’re saying that everything is fine.”

Jürgen Mlynek, president of the Helmholtz Association, insisted: “We are not in bad shape.” Basic research funding was increasing and entrepreneurial spirit growing, he said.

That provoked a German science journalist from Die Welt to exclaim: “I’m astonished.” Europe was lagging further and further behind the US and China, he said, and was suffering a brain drain of talent.

Professor Mlynek insisted again that his “unGerman” optimism was justified. On the brain drain, he commented: “The Bush years were perfect for Europe. Many young Germans who have studied in the US have come back to Europe. The conditions are just great.”

But even with the election of the Obama administration, more generous to research and more sympathetic in its political attitudes, a European brain drain to the US had not resumed, Prof Mlynek added.

It shows that China’s output of research papers increased from 20,000 in 1998 to 112,000 in 2008 – when it exceeded the individual national output of Japan, Britain and Germany. China is now second only to the USA in its scientific output.

The number of papers from Chinese authors has doubled since 2004 and will exceed even the USA within the next decade, the study says.

Interestingly, American scientists play an important role in Chinese research. US-based authors contributed to nearly 9 per cent of papers from institutions in China between 2004 and 2008.

Though Chinese research is still concentrated in the physical sciences and technology, the life sciences are growing very fast.

“When Europe and the USA visit China they can only do so as equal partners,” the report concludes. “The question that may then be put to them is what they can bring to the partnership to make it worth China’s while to share.”

The world of research

The science blog is no longer updated but it remains open as an archive.

Clive Cookson, the FT's science editor, picks out the research that everyone should know about, in fields from astronomy to zoology. He also discusses key policy issues, from R&D funding to science education. He'll cover the weird and wonderful, as well as the serious side of science.